The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), the government’s own environmental watchdog, has confirmed that the government may have broken environmental law by the watering down of critical regulations on the pollution of rivers in England.
The disclosure was made in response to a legal complaint made by ClientEarth and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) in November 2022 against the Environmental Agency for its failure to monitor and enforce environmental protections on nitrogen pollution.
The complaint was based on Freedom of Information (FOI) requests submitted by WWF and ClientEarth. The FOIs revealed that between January 2020 to December 2021 the Environment Agency conducted 2,213 inspections of three key agricultural regulations, identifying breaches in almost half of farms. However, only one case was issued with a civil sanction.
According to ClientEarth and WWF, these inspections represented just 2 percent of farms each year, suggesting that the Environment Agency has “little idea of the scale of law breaking taking place and of the damage being currently done to the environment.”
Given the high levels of nitrogen pollution in England, WWF and ClientEarth accused the Environment Agency of “an unlawful abdication of its statutory responsibilities.”
In response to the WWF and ClientEarth’s complaint, the OEP agreed that the Environment Agency had potentially breached environmental law by failing to adequately assess environmental impacts on protected conservation sites before allowing farmers to exceed manure spreading limits. English rivers are particularly at risk of nitrogen-related pollution, with over half the country classified as vulnerable to nitrogen run-off.
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